This past year’s publication of two monographs by William Butcher and
Andrew Martin marks an interesting milestone in international Verne
studies: for the first time, all three of the most noted English-language
scholars of Jules Verne now have books in print. Together with my own
Jules Verne Rediscovered (see SFS #49:369), these works constitute
a small but highly credible and ever-growing body of modern
Anglo-American criticism devoted to this most widely translated of all
French SF authors. Moreover (albeit entirely fortuitous), their
individual thematic foci tend to complement each other quite nicely: my
1988 book targeted Verne’s scientific and moral didacticism, Butcher’s
analyzes the spatio-temporal structure of Verne’s narratives, and
Martin’s investigates the ideological sub-texts of imperialism and revolt
which pervade the Voyages Extraordinaires.

Contrary to what one might surmise from its title, Butcher’s Verne’s
Journey to the Center of the Self is not a psychological study of
Verne the man (in a Freudian or Jungian sense) but, rather, a meticulous
and wide-ranging structuralist/phenomenological study of how time and
space function together in Verne’s works. Butcher explains:

Responses to the general question of plots in literature have often
employed terms like ‘slice of life,’ ‘train of events,’ ‘narrative
thread,’ or point of view.’ Their use of metaphorical objects that are
already of dimension two, one, or zero means, however, that the key
question of dimensionality is often begged. The vital problem, in other
words, remains that of knowing how mappings can take place between the
world and a one-dimensional succession of words; how space, even when
divided in two, can begin to be ‘temporalized.’

In simpler terms: how is the choice of particular journeys in time and
space made? (2)

To answer this question, Butcher closely examines a variety of
spatio-temporal structures and themes which undergird Verne’s romans
scientifiques: e.g., narrative patterns of linearity, arborescence,
and circularity; their relation to and “symbiosis” (2) with fictional and
nonfictional time (particularly evident, for example, in novels like
Voyage au Centre de la Terre); Verne’s innovative use of verb
tenses and deictics (Le Chancellor, for instance, “constitutes
apparently the very first novel in continuous prose written in the
present” [132] and L’Ile à hélice “is apparently the first—perhaps
only—one written in the third person and the present” [132]); the
conflicting thematicpresence in Verne’s texts of closure vs. openness,
invention vs. authenticity, scientific space-time vs. personal
space-time, and so forth.

Butcher analyzes these aspects of Verne’s narrative practice in the
context of late 19th century naturalistic/realistic literary
conventions—a canon within which Verne was forced to compose his fictions
and against which he is convincingly shown to have rebelled again and
again. To help illustrate his points, a number of Butcher’s (sometimes
difficult but very insightful) discussions are supplemented with graphs
and charts: e.g., fictional time vs. narrative time in certain key works
(31, 33, 35), cyclical plot structures (80), etc. But, as Butcher
discovers (and openly admits in his conclusion), finding a definitive
matrix for Verne’s treatment of space-time is an impossible
dream—similar, in some respects, to the ambitious (and Hetzel-mandated)
goal of the Voyages Extraordinaires themselves in attempting to
completely “map” the known and unknown universe.

Even at the end of our analysis, time and space in the Voyages,
considered separately, remain largely mysterious entities. Neither is
material nor immaterial, neither divinely-appointed nor created by man,
and neither is detectable as a scientific object nor constructible as a
literary subject. For Verne the positivist, the frustrating lack of
physical data tends to lead time and space to be ignored; but for Verne
the novelist-craftsman, they simply cannot be circumvented. Instead, the
problem is transferred, subsumed into such typically nineteenth-century
concerns as the relationship with other times and places, the nature of
identity and difference, or the functioning of feedback systems. Time and
space in the Voyages ultimately remain a loose bundle of
conceptions and perceptions, defined above all in terms of each other.
Although rarely imperceptible, they stay consistently and implacably
unanalysable....

[T]he Voyages Extraordinaires seem to present themselves as a
heroic and exemplary failure: they prove that even the most visionary
survey of Nature’s outstanding features cannot put the world back
together again....Verne puts another nail into the remaining
encyclopaedic aims of the Age of Reason; and contributes massively to
what was to become the new uncertainty.

But in this book, as in the Voyages, it is not the end-product or
the destination that counts; it is the journey itself. And Butcher goes
well beyond most Vernian critics in his coming to grips not only with the
author’s complex rendering of space and time but also with the relation
between Verne’s son Michel and the posthumous novels of the Voyages
Extraordinaires— fictions long known to have been (at the very least)
partially rewritten or (at most) completely authored by the latter.

In summary, I know of no other study, in French or in English, which
treats the spatio-temporal aspect of Verne’s creative vision so
comprehensively and incisively. In Verne’s Journey to the Center of
the Self, Butcher has very capably explored the conceptual framework
in which Verne composed his fictions; and, as a result, he has
effectively demonstrated Verne’s “modernity” as a writer as well as his
status as a genuinely literary (as opposed to scientific) prophet
for the 20th century.

But be forewarned: for the anglophone reader who is not an aficionado of
Verne and/or does not possess a Ph.D. in literary studies,Butcher’s study
may present a challenge. All French quotations remain untranslated, the
arguments presented (while cogent) are dense, intricate, and presuppose a
familiarity with the nomenclature of modern literary theory, and the many
sub-chapter rubrics sometimes tend to fragment one’s sense of exegetic
continuity. Finally, the forward by Ray Bradbury, although quite
impressive as a marketing accoutrement, is generally disappointing—mostly
rehash and generic accolades—particularly when compared to his earlier
essay titled The Ardent Blasphemers. As for Martin’s (more easily
read but equally insightful) The Mask of the Prophet, its title
refers not only to Verne himself and to the many efforts made by French
critics to discover his “true” identity, but also to the highly unique
thematic/heuristic paradigm around which Martin’s study is organized:
i.e., the tale of a Masked Prophet in revolt against an Empire. The
two-fold source of this story is (prior to Verne) Napoleon Bonaparte and
(after Verne) Jorge Luis Borges—against whom Martin compares Verne.
Martin explains his unusual modus operandi as follows:

To give an oblique impression of the sheer range of Verne’s writing, and
because it invites a double reading, I shall be invoking as models the
work of two other, very different, writers (different from Verne and from
each other)...Napoleon and Borges....Verne’s extraordinary fictions
persistently tell and retell, in multifarious forms, the story of a
masked prophet who promises to reveal what is concealed. It is this
recurrence that provides one of the many justifications for the seemingly
arbitrary act of linking Verne with the names of Napoleon and Borges. For
both of these writers tell essentially the same tale, archetypal in its
implication and scope. (9, 14)

While freely admitting that the story per se of a Masked Prophet
rebelling against an Empire actually appears in none of Verne’s
Voyages, Martin contends that it nevertheless constitutes—either
explicitly or metaphorically—an ever-present politico-ideological
backdrop to virtually all of them:

The Voyages can thus be read as an extended commentary on the
narrative of the Masked Prophet, a set of variations on the infinitely
rich themes the story contains. The fictions of Verne constitute a
sequence of meditations on the ramifications of imperialism and its
metaphorical counterparts. In particular, the Voyages explore both
the avenues followed in the respective versions of the tale by Napoleon
and Borges....The Vernian oeuvre might be said to enact the
transformation linking Napoleon to Borges. (16-17)

To illustrate his point, at the outset of each chapter throughout The
Mask of the Prophet, Martin reproduces excerpts from Napoleon’s Le
Masque prophète and Borges’ The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv
which then serve as catalysts to his own (ingeniously deconstructive)
commentaries on a wide variety of novels from Verne’s Voyages
Extraordinaires.

Martin’s often brilliant analysis of these novels in the light of
Bonaparte and Borges succeeds in revealing the latent tension in Verne’s
narratives as the author strains to reconcile the irreconcilable: i.e.,
the bourgeois (Napoleonic) ideology of positivist codification/closure,
imperialist expansionism, and strict uniformity of narrative discourse
along with its symbiotic yet subversive (Borgesian) counterpart of
decategorization/open-endedness, libertarian individuation, and ironic
self-parody. In Martin’s terms, the former characteristics constitute the
hegemony of “Empire,” the latter represent “Revolt,” and the “Masked
Prophet”—or “The Prophet of the Mask,” as Martin suggestively titles his
final chapter—is both the author himself and the Voyages
Extraordinaires as literary artifacts from a specific historical era,
both of which are disguising themselves to be something they are not.
Moreover, as mediators of this ideological and narratological tug-of-war,
Verne’s novels also symbolize, in a more general sense, the
tension-filled dialectical nature of literature itself: i.e., the
perpetual interplay between the innovative and the normative, between
creation and canon:

The narrative of the rise and fall, the expansion and fragmentation of
empire encapsulates the destiny of all concentrations of power—political,
intellectual, and linguistic....Verne is a condensation of the forces
that issue in the great system-builders of his era (Comte, Balzac, Marx)
and the de-systematizers (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Roussel), the
metaphysicians and the ironists. The narrow obsessions of the Voyages
Extraordinaires attain almost unlimited symbolic power, generating an
encyclopaedia of the forking paths of the future, a labyrinth from which
we have still not emerged. To speak of Verne is thus in some way to speak
of all literature. (201)

Whereas Butcher’s Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Self is an
in-depth elaboration of various narratological/structural(ist) analyses
first sketched out by the French theorist Jean Ricardou and well-known
Vernian critics like François Raymond, Jean Delabroy, and Jean Roudaut,
Martin’s The Mask of the Prophet follows in the footsteps of three
very different French scholars whose earlier studies of the Voyages
Extraordinaires offered a more archetypal/political/ideological
perspective: Michel Serres, Jean Chesneaux, and Pierre Macherey. But both
new books are worthy and welcome additions to the growing corpus of
English-language scholarship on Jules Verne and its efforts to both
defamiliarize and refamiliarize (i.e., to “unmask”) for the
Anglo-American public the multi-layered richness of Jules Verne’s
legendary novels.